gents, I'm taking the liberty of posting this from my sony psp. with the browser hack enabled, I was able to get here, and post. its much like doing it on a cell phone, but it does work. i'll post again once the pictures are up.

Yeah, it IS kinda James Bond-ish in a way. It wasnt hard. Other hackers out there have hacked it, and one guy did some nifty DNS work so that if you change the PSP's primary DNS setting as opposed to having it pull DNS from the airport base station, it goes right to his custom page, which you can then use to get just about anywhere else. I got into macmod, and I was also able to post to my livejournal. Mucho cool.

The browser is part of Wipeout Pure, so its not a traditional browser per-say. But, it does handle most all the stuff I looked at containing java, flash, and so on. It renders a generic font, and cant resize pages to the screen size, but it does let you scroll around the pages to see everything, so its not half bad.

Entering text is done with the PSP's internal keypad system, which is much like modern cell phones. A series of buttons which support multiple characters. Not hard, but not like a keyboard for sure.

As far as page load time, its nominal. Its pulling 802.11b from my AP-extreme base station, and it has to load and draw everything, but its totally faster than dial-up.

Most recently, I've been playing with the Mac APP's for interfacing with the unit. It requires USB2, so the mac Mini works like a charm. I've had the best luck with iPSP so far, which lets you sync things, and move music, movies, and photos back and forth. It also compresses the video to the right size and format, with the ability to scale quality. I converted over the original Ghost In The Shell which I'd ripped from DVD (thank you handbrake) and then compressed it to about 200MB which was then dumped to the PSP. the transfer to the PSP didnt take long, and it ran full screen. It was a little pixely, considering I crushed it down so hard, but it played, and was watchable, at probably about VHS quality.

One thing that caught me was that the unit can check your memory stick for games and applications that it can run from memory. This means that the device can and may eventually support 3rd party apps other than games. email clients, web browsers, war-driving programs, who knows! It could be truly awesome. I dare say I dont regret giving up my DS. I think sony may have pulled a Coup Detat on Nintendo with this one. It really is like having a PS2 in your pocket, as opposed to the GBA and the DS, which felt more like they were little brothers to the set top systems.

Is it a replacement for my iPod? hell no. my iPod is 30GB, and has all my music. The PSP has a 512MB memory stick in it. it wont hold half of what I have. Similarly, its larger than my ipod, and I'm still deathly afraid of scratching my PSP's screen. It also has about half the battery life of my iPod. The PSP is a game system on crack, as opposed to a true mp3 player. Its nicer than my PDA, and its easier to game on than my laptop, but I wont be copying large movies to it, or tons of MP3's. Its my game player. Hopefully, with the release of more apps, and maybe if Sony offers a UMB burner (heh heh) it could open this device up like nobody ever imagined.

So, yeah, I'm happy with it. I played some serious wipeout pure, while my car was getting an oil change. 15 minutes never went by so quick! w00t!

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